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father would have redrafted his will if he had realised that he was facing death. Mary felt ironically amused to learn that he had died of a chill on the lungs. Her mother had suffered a long agonising decline and a painful death from tuberculosis, brought on, Mary was sure, by her husband’s refusal to allow her any home comforts. She had lived as poorly as any of the workers in her husband’s mill.
    Yes, Mary reflected, her father had been a hard man and a cruel one, but now he was dead, and she had decided to move back to Preston. She knew people would question her decision, but she had her own reasons for being here.
    Frowning, she studied the huge oil painting of her father that hung at the top of the stairs.
    ‘I want you to take that down,’ she instructed the removal men.
    ‘That’s fine, missus, but where will you be wanting us to put it?’ the foreman asked her.
    ‘Anywhere you like, just so long as it is gone from this house,’ Mary responded coolly.
    She had ordered coal to be delivered ahead of her arrival, but it seemed that her late father’s housekeeper had not received her instructions tolight fires in every room. Ringing for her, Mary stood in the hallway and watched as the men struggled with the huge gilded frame.
    She had been eighteen years old when the portrait had been commissioned and her father had been at the height of his power. He had paid the man who had painted it more than he had spent in feeding and clothing her mother and herself in a dozen years. Mary knew because she had seen the bill.
    ‘You rang for me, miss? Oh, the master’s portrait…’ The housekeeper, Mrs Jenkins, placed her hand to her throat in shock as she saw what the men were doing.
    ‘Yes I did,’ Mary confirmed. ‘It seems that a letter I sent you from London, requesting that you have fires lit in all the rooms, went astray. And –’
    ‘Oh no, I got the letter, miss,’ Mrs Jenkins confirmed, ‘but the master would never have allowed anything like that. Why, even in the week he died he refused to have a fire lit in his bedroom, despite the doctor saying that he should.’
    Mary could tell from her accent that the housekeeper was a countrywoman, and she suspected that, like everyone else who had ever worked for her father, she had been in terror of him.
    ‘My father is dead now, Mrs Jenkins, and I am mistress here,’ Mary replied. ‘You will, I hope, find me a good and a fair mistress, just so long as you understand that it is I and not my father who now gives the orders. As soon as you have amaid free you will instruct her to light all the fires, please.’
    ‘Very well, miss…but you cannot mean to remove your father’s portrait,’ the housekeeper blurted out. ‘He was that proud of it; used to stand and look at it every day, he did, before he got poorly.’
    ‘Thank you, Mrs Jenkins, I am aware of my father’s pride in himself.’ And of every other aspect of his unpleasant personality, Mary could have added.
    She still bore the faint scars on her back where he had whipped her as a child. She was forty now, but sometimes at night, when she couldn’t sleep, they still ached.
    ‘But what is to go in its place?’ the housekeeper was fretting. ‘The wallpaper will have faded, and in such a large space –’
    ‘If it has then we shall have new wallpaper, Mrs Jenkins. In fact, I believe we shall have new wallpaper anyway. Something light and modern. Now just as soon as the men have finished, I want someone to take them down to the kitchen and give them a good hearty meal before they leave.’
    The housekeeper was staring at her, and Mary guessed why. She doubted that anyone in the household knew what a good hearty meal was. Well, they were soon going to discover.
    She might have particular plans for the huge inheritance she had received, but that did not meanthat she didn’t fully intend to enjoy some of its benefits immediately. Starting with doing something about the house.
    As the men